Police and racism
With the continuing obsessive coverage of the whole Gates arrest situation in Cambridge, it reminds me of a few things. The first is how totally worthless the “mainstream media” is in this country, that in the most deadly month yet in Iraq, with healthcare on the line, etc., all they care about is blowing up something that isn’t controversial into something gigantic. The media, as always, is more obsessed with playing news-maker than news-reporter.
Second, what President Obama said may have been poor word choice, but it was not incorrect. Arresting someone who had not broken the law—in their own home—because they seem to have not demonstrated the proper level of subservience and deference to cops who were mistaken is stupid. It is glaring stupid. It is a level of stupid derived from people so intoxicated with their own sense of self-righteousness and power-obsession.
Thirdly, anyone—black or white—who was being accused of a crime, in their own home, after having demonstrated that they were who they said they were, and who was being harassed by the police would be agitated. If I had just arrived back from a 15+ hour flight from China to not be able to get into my house, and then quickly found someone accusing me of being a criminal, I’d be a lot more than just agitated. I’d be seriously upset and argumentative.
Lastly, that whether people care to acknowledge it or not, people are treated differently based on their color of their skin, especially by the police. To not see that is to have ones head in the sand. This is most emphatically not a post-racial society. The election of an African-American man with a Islamic name is a demonstration of the total and complete abject failure of the Bush administration and Republicans, not the movement of a society past racial concerns.
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I’d like to offer a slightly different perspective.
First, we have an African-American president. This means that at least on some rather broad level, we as a nation have almost completely, if not completely overcome race as a national issue. That doesn’t mean that many, many people in this country are still racist, but that will never change. There’s a difference between eliminating the social acceptability of racism and eliminating racism itself. The former might be possible; the latter will never happen.
It’s also my understanding that it’s not just white cops who have a predilection for confronting blacks on the streets disproportionately to whites. Even black cops can do it. I think that while many acts of cop racism are the result of individual and group racism, the broader issue of legal injustice has more to do with class than race. There just happens to still exist a strong coincidence between race and class, but in my opinion the cause-and-effect relationship between the two is dimishing. I think the key factor to success in our present society, apart from inheritance, is one’s willingness and ability to be or appear to be of the dominant European culture and class. Many blacks, Gates included, have found a very comfortable home there, individual racist cops notwithstanding.
But, second, my biggest beef is with Gates himself. Here’s a recent quote from him about the incident—from an appearance on CNN, if I’m not mistaken:
“What it made me realize was how vulnerable all black men are, how vulnerable all people of color are, and all poor people, to capricious forces like a rogue policeman, and this man clearly was a rogue policeman.”
Just where has Gates been? I’ve never been hassled by a rogue policeman, and even I know this goes on, and I’ve known it for a very, very long time. He actually admitted publicly that he was ignorant of the plight of “all poor people.” I think the real cause of Gates’ outrage has to do with the fact that he’s a wealthy and famous Harvard professor being hassled by a cop, not so much that he’s a black man being hassled by a cop, as I think “Phantom Negro” puts it well here:
Skip Gates, please sit down
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/07/24/gates/
Racism has usually been used as a distraction from the real issue of class in our society, despite the fact that racism itself has produced a tragic and viscious record of harm of its own. Even the black president that we just elected is continuing the class warfare on Americans started by his white predecessors. The more things change, the more they stay the same.